Category Archives: Linux

I had been using Fedora version 20 for most of year 2014. Fedora 21 was a welcome change for a few reasons. I didn’t need to install the Nvidia video card driver. In Fedora 20 without this driver, the GPU fan would spin at top speed and was really noisy. With the driver the spinning would slow down just moments before the login screen would pop up. But with Fedora 21, the GPU fan slows down in a few seconds … Continue reading →

For those of you who have been following my Linux posts, you know that I have been a Fedora user since February of 2005 with Fedora Core 3. I tried Ubuntu from time to time but always had problems. However in the middle of last year 2013 I moved to Ubuntu based Linux Mint 15 preferring it over Fedora 19. For some reason I couldn’t figure out the Fedora 19 installer correctly. When it did install Fedora 19, my files … Continue reading →

On January 5th and the 16th, I transformed 2 messed up Windows XP PCs into fast and stable Linux machines. On the first one, I installed Fedora 16, and the second, the latest Linus Mint 14 “Nadia.” In both cases I backed up the friend’s documents to another media, installed Linux, and restored all the documents and Desktop files to the newly created home user partition. A local friend’s Windows XP PC became unstable to the point it would not … Continue reading →

Well, I’m back again to my beloved Fedora Linux. Fedora 18 Beta was not easy to install but is working fine after a few hours of tweaking. I started with LXDE as my default desktop environment. LXDE is lacking in some graphic configuration settings, but after logging into Gnome 3 I was able to configure things I could not configure in LXDE. A few days later I installed KDE and now consider it the easiest Linux desktop environment to configure … Continue reading →

I may be leaving Fedora Linux for good this time. Fedora 17’s added “features” were not a plus for me. Moreover, things that worked fine before became quirky. For example, switching to Japanese input using Ibus required me to press Ctrl + Space 3 or 4 times to make it work. Linux Mint Debian works instantly and gives me the added feature of merely pressing the Hankaku key (on Japanese keyboards). … Continue reading →

This morning I was asked if I could extract the audio tracks of certain Youtube videos and make a compilation of them on an audio CD in order to listen to them using a CD player. “I don’t know how or if it’s even possible,” I replied. “Come on!” she said, “I know you can figure it out if you tried.” And so I was faced with another technical challenge. But thanks to the ease of looking up information from … Continue reading →

This post is aimed at Linux users, and especially at techies. When Fedora 16 went gold on Nov. 8, 2011, I immediately installed it and used the new BTRFS for my /home partition. I read that BTRFS may become the default file system in Fedora and was under the assumption that BTRFS now had a good file system tool to fix errors. It turned out that I created an accident waiting to happen! … Continue reading →

This is an technical article that only Linux users would understand and appreciate. I like to secure the Grub boot loader to make it harder for anybody but me to get root access to my PC by either a cold startup, or rebooting the system. Grub version 1 had a password option. It was easily implemented by editing the grub.conf configuration file and adding the password option data. But in Fedora 16, Grub version 2 has replaced Grub 1, and … Continue reading →

I’ve been working for a Japanese NPO, Leap High 28. Today I was asked by the NPO Chairperson, Yoko Ishikawa to upload a DVD file to Help Japan 2011, a website we made together to raise support for the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsumami victims. This is the code I used to convert the file to .flv on a laptop with the Ubuntu 11.10 Linux. Note the you need to have mencoder installed. mencoder VTS_03_1.VOB -of lavf -ovc lavc … Continue reading →

November 9: After getting sick of Gnome 3 on Fedora 15, I tried Linux Mint Debian for a while because it has the Gnome 2 desktop environment, my favourite to date. Linux Mint Debian ran very well but because there were certain tweaks to the system I wanted to implement but could not (but can in Fedora), I decided to go back to Fedora 14, the last Fedora with Gnome 2. The creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, preferred Gnome 2 … Continue reading →

I had been using Fedora 15 for about 5 weeks since it came out at the beginning of June, but now again I switched back to Linux Mint Debian. Gnome 3 IMHO was too radical a departure from how I was used to operating. KDE4 was slow at times. Neither LXDE or XFCE seemed to support a Favorite Applications menu. Only Gnome 2 could make me happy again using my PC, and I figured Linux Mint Debian with its speed … Continue reading →

In a post I wrote on February 7, I said I moved from Fedora 14 to Linux Mint Debian. Well, less than two weeks later I moved back to Fedora 14. I’m familiar with the Fedora way of tweaking the system, and I just couldn’t figure out how to set up certain things in Linux Mint Debian. Fedora is not only cutting edge, it’s more user friendly than Debian based distros for technicians in my opinion. I’ve been with Fedora … Continue reading →

A local company gave me a Pentium 4 class PC with Microsoft Server 2003 on it The hard drive is only 40 gigabytes, but big enough for what I wanted to do with it. I thought to use it to setup my own webserver to host a Japanese language site to promote my employer’s local English teaching and translation services. I’ve been working with PCs from 1987 but I had no knowledge about setting up webservers. Any time I learn … Continue reading →

The other day I discovered that Linux Mint recently came out with a Debian edition with features that are still lacking in Ubuntu. One of the main features that caught my interest is the ability to install Linux Mint Debian on a PC with multiple hard disk drives. It has been my practice for a few years now to have the /home partition on a second hard disk, and to use the first hard disk for the OS on a … Continue reading →

I upgraded to Fedora 13 beta from the middle of April. Except for a couple of issues that I considered to be yet bugs in the beta version, I consider Fedora 13 to be the best Fedora Linux yet. Nevertheless, I thought to give Ubuntu 10.4 another chance before Fedora 13 goes gold on May 18. I realized later that Ubuntu 10.4 was still in beta testing when I wrote about it on March 18. The first thing I noticed … Continue reading →

I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, version 10.4, and installed it as a virtual machine with VMWare on my Fedora 12 pc. I also ran it as a live CD from boot. I’m still not convinced that Ubuntu is better than Fedora for me. Ubuntu is missing two GUIs (software with a graphic user interface) I use all the time in Fedora. There is no firewall GUI no services GUI … Continue reading →

I installed a beta version of the new Gnome Shell desktop environment on my Fedora Linux PC, and it seems to be very cool indeed! And it’s free, not only free in in the meaning of “freedom” but even free as in “free lunch.” Gnome is the standard desktop graphical environment for many Linux distributions, including Fedora, the Linux distribution I’ve been using on my PC since February 2005. Another popular Linux desktop environment is KDE. Some people like it … Continue reading →

November 2: Fedora Linux version 12 is due to come out on November 18, but I couldn’t wait to try it out and installed the yet beta version. Improvements from Fedora 11 that I’ve noticed: The default video driver recognized my dual monitor setup and automatically gave me the correct screen resolution and spanning monitors. Gnome seems to run faster. Terminal now comes up instantaneously. Many of the applications appear to load faster. Pulse audio now works as it should … Continue reading →

Request

The articles on this site are free, but the time it took to pipe them to you ... isn't. If something on this website was a blessing to you, please consider sending me a donation of even a few dollars to support my efforts to share truth with the world and keep this site going. If you have a Paypal account, you can send a donation to: james.arendt@deeptruths.com

This domain is jamesjpn.net but my other website is www.deeptruths.com I hope you visit it as well.